Vignettes of San Francisco eBook

Poppies and lupine and many others are the flower
tradition of California but they are not what I mean
here. It is an impression of mine that San Francisco
more than any other city has taken the traditional
plants and flowers of other sections and made them
into a composite that makes up the plant atmosphere
of this city.

Take roses and geraniums and callas, none of which
are epochal because they are always at hand.
But with old Mrs. Deacon Rogers in Connecticut who
nursed her calla through the long winter that she might
take it to church on Easter Sunday, the calla was
history.

Even the camellia San Franciscans take very philosophically.
It has not, for instance, the supremacy that Dumas
gives it in “Camille.” In Sacramento
they feature it more and an Easterner who saw them
picking it in branches instead of single flowers,
exclaimed: “Why, they think they’re
oleanders.”

The plant and flower atmosphere of a community is
very important. Some child is now growing up
in the city, who some day will be far away when there
will come to him a whiff, perhaps of acacia, and in
an instant there will come surging over him all the
feel and urge and thrill and wistfulness and dreams
of his childhood, and he will be once more in the
atmosphere of San Francisco. It will not include
winter and summer but an all-round-the-year-ness,
it will not mean a flower, but flowers, cherry blossoms
from Japan, acacia from Australia, and the best from
everywhere which all together will mean to him —
San Francisco.

The smell of the acacia, which he knew as the wattle,
inspired Kipling to write those words

“Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heart strings crack.”

Perhaps many others see with me this difference between
San Francisco and the rest of the country, as though
nature here expresses herself in bounty more than
in resurrection. Oh, well, whether it be “lilac
time” or “all the time” to each
locality there is its own beauty and, as for me, I
have yet to find, in all my travels, the “place
that God forgot.”

It Takes All Sorts

“Hey, hey,” called the tall, nervous man
with the fat, little wife, waving his arms at the
conductor for fear he would be carried past his corner.

“It takes all sorts of people to make a world,”
remarked the sensible-looking woman beside me.

It is not the first time that I have been impressed
with the philosophy of those words. Who said
them first, I wonder. “It takes all sorts
of people to make a world.” That is, if
we only had one sort or even a number of sorts we
would have no world. To make a world there must
be all sorts, including the funniest folks we ever
knew.

I looked from the sensible woman with her well-chosen
clothes to the woman across the way. This second
woman was a sort of dressed-up-and-no-place-to-go
type, with a squirt of Cashmere Bouquet in the center
of her handkerchief. And nothing on that went
with anything else she had on. And a hat which
one knew was a hat, because it was on her head, otherwise
it might have passed for almost anything.